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36 results in Seventeenth-Century Music

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Barbara Strozzi in Context
  • Edited by Beth Glixon, Wendy Heller
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    19 March 2026
  • Renowned as both a singer and composer, Barbara Strozzi was among the most accomplished and prolific composers of vocal chamber music in the seventeenth century. Her works, which have become increasingly popular in concert and recordings in recent decades, are remarkable for their musical sophistication and extraordinary range of expression-humor, irony, eroticism, pathos, and religious devotion. The adopted daughter of the poet Giulio Strozzi and mother of four children, Barbara Strozzi (who might have been a courtesan) was also for a time a participant in Venice's vibrant libertine intellectual and artistic world. This first English-language volume to focus on the composer brings together invited essays by an international group of scholars from diverse disciplines to explore Strozzi's life, her music, and the complex world she inhabited. Chapters focus not only on Strozzi, but also on other prominent women of the time, and on other issues including financial questions and matters of sexuality.

Monteverdi and the Marvellous
  • Poetry, Sound, and Representation
  • Roseen Giles
  • Published online:
    10 October 2023
    Print publication:
    28 September 2023
  • The marvellous, a key concept in literary debates at the turn of the seventeenth century, involved sensory and perspectival transformation, a rhetoric built on the unexpected, contradictory, and thought-provoking. The composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) created a new practice in which the expressive materials of music and poetry were placed in concert. This innovative new study of Monteverdi's literary personality integrates musical and poetic analysis to create an approach to text-music relations that addresses scholars of both literature and music. It illuminates how experiments in language and perception at the turn of the seventeenth century were influenced and informed by the work of musicians of that era. Giles provides a new perspective on the music and poetry of Monteverdi's madrigals through the poetics of the marvellous. In his madrigals, Monteverdi created a reciprocity between poetry and music which encouraged audiences to contemplate their interactions, and, consequently, to listen differently.

George Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture
  • Simon Jackson
  • Published online:
    11 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022
  • Described by one contemporary as the 'sweet singer of The Temple', George Herbert has long been recognised as a lover of music. Nevertheless, Herbert's own participation in seventeenth-century musical culture has yet to be examined in detail. This is the first extended critical study to situate Herbert's roles as priest, poet and musician in the context of the musico-poetic activities of members of his extended family, from the song culture surrounding William Herbert and Mary Sidney to the philosophy of his eldest brother Edward Herbert of Cherbury. It examines the secular visual music of the Stuart court masque as well as the sacred songs of the church. Arguing that Herbert's reading of Augustine helped to shape his musical thought, it explores the tension between the abstract ideal of music and its practical performance to articulate the distinctive theological insights Herbert derived from the musical culture of his time.

Popular Opera in Eighteenth-Century France
  • Music and Entertainment before the Revolution
  • David Charlton
  • Published online:
    09 December 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021
  • This is the first book for a century to explore the development of French opera with spoken dialogue from its beginnings. Musical comedy in this form came in different styles and formed a distinct genre of opera, whose history has been obscured by neglect. Its songs were performed in private homes, where operas themselves were also given. The subject-matter was far wider in scope than is normally thought, with news stories and political themes finding their way onto the popular stage. In this book, David Charlton describes the comedic and musical nature of eighteenth-century popular French opera, considering topics such as Gherardi's theatre, Fair Theatre and the 'musico-dramatic art' created in the mid-eighteenth century. Performance practices, singers, audience experiences and theatre staging are included, as well as a pioneering account of the formation of a core of 'canonical' popular works.

Music and Power at the Court of Louis XIII
  • Sounding the Liturgy in Early Modern France
  • Peter Bennett
  • Published online:
    07 May 2021
    Print publication:
    27 May 2021
  • What role did sacred music play in mediating Louis XIII's grip on power in the early seventeenth century? How can a study of music as 'sounding liturgy' contribute to the wider discourse on absolutism and 'the arts' in early modern France? Taking the scholarship of the so-called 'ceremonialists' as a point of departure, Peter Bennett engages with Weber's seminal formulation of power to consider the contexts in which liturgy, music and ceremonial legitimated the power of a king almost continuously engaged in religious conflict. Numerous musical settings show that David, the psalmist, musician, king and agent of the Holy Spirit, provided the most enduring model of kingship; but in the final decade of his life, as Louis dedicated the Kingdom to the Virgin Mary, the model of 'Christ the King' became even more potent – a model reflected in a flowering of musical publication and famous paintings by Vouet and Champaigne.

Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools
  • Amanda Eubanks Winkler
  • Published online:
    14 May 2020
    Print publication:
    04 June 2020
  • Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools is the first book to systematically analyze the role that the performing arts played in English schools after the Reformation. Although the material record is riddled with gaps, Amanda Eubanks Winkler sheds light on the subject through an innovative methodology that combines rigorous archival research with phenomenological and performance studies approaches. She organizes her study around a series of performance-based questions that demonstrate how the schoolroom intersected with the church, the court, the domicile, the concert room, and the professional theater, which allows her to provide fresh perspectives on well-known canonical operas performed by children, as well as lesser-known works. Eubanks Winkler also interrogates the notion that performance is ephemeral, as she considers how scores and playtexts serve as a conduit between past and present, and demonstrates the ways in which pedagogical performance is passed down through embodied praxis.

Compositional Artifice in the Music of Henry Purcell
  • Alan Howard
  • Published online:
    30 September 2019
    Print publication:
    17 October 2019
  • Fugal invention has proved a successful line of analytical inquiry in recent studies of repertoires from Josquin to J. S. Bach. Alan Howard brings similar insights to the music of Henry Purcell, and proposes the first analytical approach to his music to examine compositional methods alongside historically contemporary theory, focusing particularly on Purcell's 'artificial' approach to imitative counterpoint. Through this methodology Howard challenges previous responses to Purcell's music that portrayed him as fundamentally conservative. This study offers fresh insights into the musical world in which Purcell lived and worked and situates Purcell's compositional concerns in the broader context of notions of artifice in Restoration culture. Howard thereby offers both a fresh analytical approach - to Purcell's early instrumental works and to his later concerted vocal music - and a critique of the reception history surrounding the fantazias and sonatas in particular.

Musical Authorship from Schütz to Bach
  • Stephen Rose
  • Published online:
    25 May 2019
    Print publication:
    30 May 2019
  • What did the term 'author' denote for Lutheran musicians in the generations between Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach? As part of the Musical Performance and Reception series, this book examines attitudes to authorship as revealed in the production, performance and reception of music in seventeenth-century German lands. Analysing a wide array of archival, musical, philosophical and theological texts, this study illuminates notions of creativity in the period and the ways in which individuality was projected and detected in printed and manuscript music. Its investigation of musical ownership and regulation shows how composers appealed to princely authority to protect their publications, and how town councils sought to control the compositional efforts of their church musicians. Interpreting authorship as a dialogue between authority and individuality, this book uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore changing attitudes to the self in the era between Schütz and Bach.

The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603)
  • Owen Rees
  • Published online:
    13 March 2019
    Print publication:
    28 March 2019
  • Victoria's Requiem is among the best-loved and most-performed musical works of the Renaissance, and is often held to be 'a Requiem for an age', representing the summation of golden-age Spanish polyphony. Yet it has been the focus of surprisingly little research. Owen Rees's multifaceted study brings together the historical and ritual contexts for the work's genesis, the first detailed musical analysis of the Requiem itself, and the long story of its circulation and reception. Victoria composed this music in 1603 for the exequies of María of Austria, and oversaw its publication two years later. A rich variety of contemporary documentation allows these events - and the nature of music in Habsburg exequies - to be reconstructed vividly. Rees then locates Victoria's music within the context of a vast international repertory of Requiems, much of it previously unstudied, and identifies the techniques which render this work so powerfully distinctive and coherent.

The Guitar in Stuart England
  • A Social and Musical History
  • Christopher Page
  • Published online:
    09 November 2017
    Print publication:
    16 November 2017
  • This is the first history of the guitar during the reign of the Stuarts, a time of great political and social upheaval in England. In this engaging and original volume, Christopher Page gathers a rich array of portraits, literary works and other, previously unpublished, archival materials in order to create a comprehensive picture of the guitar from its early appearances in Jacobean records, through its heyday at the Restoration court in Whitehall, to its decline in the first decades of the eighteenth century. The book explores the passion of Charles II himself for the guitar, and that of Samuel Pepys, who commissioned the largest repertoire of guitar-accompanied song to survive from baroque Europe. Written in Page's characteristically approachable style, this volume will appeal to general readers as well as to music historians and guitar specialists.

Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel
  • Edited by Colin Timms, Bruce Wood
  • Published online:
    10 June 2017
    Print publication:
    29 June 2017
  • This book is concerned with a hundred years of musical drama in England. It charts the development of the genre from the theatre works of Henry Purcell (and his contemporaries) to the dramatic oratorios of George Frideric Handel (and his). En route it investigates the objections to all-sung drama in English that were articulated in the decades around 1700, various proposed solutions, the importation of Italian opera, and the creation of the dramatic oratorio - English drama, all-sung but not staged. Most of the constituent essays take an in-depth look at a particular aspect of the process, while others draw attention to dramatic qualities in non-dramatic works that also were performed in the theatre. The journey from Purcell to Handel illustrates the vigour and vitality of English theatrical and musical traditions, and Handel's dramatic oratorios and other settings of English words answer questions posed before he was born.

The Polyphonic Mass in France, 1600–1780
  • The Evidence of the Printed Choirbooks
  • Jean-Paul C. Montagnier
  • Published online:
    31 March 2017
    Print publication:
    16 March 2017
  • This is the first ever book-length study of the a cappella masses which appeared in France in choirbook layout during the baroque era. Though the musical settings of the Ordinarium missæ and of the Missa pro defunctis have been the subject of countless studies, the stylistic evolution of the polyphonic masses composed in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been neglected owing to the labor involved in creating scores from the surviving individual parts. Jean-Paul C. Montagnier has examined closely the printed, engraved and stenciled choirbooks containing this repertoire, and his book focuses mainly on the music as it stands in them. After tracing the choirbooks' publishing history, the author places these mass settings in their social, liturgical and musical context. He shows that their style did not all adhere strictly to the stile antico, but could also employ the most up-to-date musical language of the period.

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera
  • A History
  • Rebecca Harris-Warrick
  • Published online:
    03 November 2016
    Print publication:
    27 October 2016
  • Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Académie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.

An Account of the Musical Celebrations on St Cecilia's Day in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
  • William Henry Husk
  • Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    13 November 2014
    First published in:
    1857
  • Cecilia, a martyr of the early Christian church, has traditionally been honoured as the patron saint of music. Precisely how that association arose remains uncertain, yet she has inspired many composers over the centuries, notably Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten. A music scholar and contributor to the first edition of Grove's Dictionary, William Henry Husk (1814–87) joined the Sacred Harmonic Society in 1834 and served as its librarian from 1852. This captivating work, first published in 1857, was prompted by what Husk felt to be unaccountable neglect by music historians of an important aspect of musical life. His carefully researched summary traces the musical celebrations of Cecilia's feast day, 22 November, in Britain and Europe from 1571 to 1846. An appendix gives the texts of numerous odes written for St Cecilia's Day, including pieces by Dryden and Brady, set to music by Handel and Purcell respectively.

The Lure and Legacy of Music at Versailles
  • Louis XIV and the Aix School
  • John Hajdu Heyer
  • Published online:
    05 November 2014
    Print publication:
    06 November 2014
  • Louis XIV and his court at Versailles had a profound influence on music in France and throughout Europe. In 1660 Louis visited Aix-en-Provence, a trip that resulted in political and cultural transformations throughout the region. Soon thereafter Aix became an important center of sacred music composition, eventually rivaling Paris for the quality of the composers it produced. John Hajdu Heyer documents the young king's visit and examines how he and his court deployed sacred music to enhance the royal image and secure the loyalty of the populace. Exploring the circle of composers at Aix, Heyer provides the most up-to-date and complete biographies in English of nine key figures, including Guillaume Poitevin, André Campra, Jean Gilles, François Estienne, and Antoine Blanchard. The book goes on to reveal how the history of political power in the region was reflected through church music, and how musicians were affected by contemporary events.

Musical Creativity in Restoration England
  • Rebecca Herissone
  • Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    10 October 2013
  • Musical Creativity in Restoration England is the first comprehensive investigation of approaches to creating music in late seventeenth-century England. Understanding creativity during this period is particularly challenging because many of our basic assumptions about composition - such as concepts of originality, inspiration and genius - were not yet fully developed. In adopting a new methodology that takes into account the historical contexts in which sources were produced, Rebecca Herissone challenges current assumptions about compositional processes and offers new interpretations of the relationships between notation, performance, improvisation and musical memory. She uncovers a creative culture that was predominantly communal, and reveals several distinct approaches to composition, determined not by individuals, but by the practical function of the music. Herissone's new and original interpretations pose a fundamental challenge to our preconceptions about what it meant to be a composer in the seventeenth century and raise broader questions about the interpretation of early modern notation.

Bach: Mass in B Minor
  • John Butt
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 June 1991
  • The Mass in B Minor is arguably Bach's greatest single work. In this short guide John Butt considers the work from many angles offering the reader basic information in a concise and accessible form. The Mass in B Minor is fraught with difficulties regarding its origin, and ambiguities concerning its function. John Butt looks again at the historical sources and provides an up-to-date summary of existing research and opinions together with new insights of his own. He gives a vivid account of the work's genesis, its historical context, and its reception by later generations. One chapter considers the work movement by movement providing the text in both Latin and English. The final group of chapters on the music itself suggests some new approaches to the work - its forms, style and overall structure - which are both critically and historically based. This is an informative and lucid guide, valuable for student and music lover alike.

Handel: Messiah
  • Donald Burrows
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 June 1991
  • This new guide to Handel's most celebrated work traces the course of Messiah from Handel's initial musical response to the libretto, through the oratorio's turbulent first years to its eventual popularity with the Foundling Hospital performances. Different chapters consider the varying reception the work received in Dublin and London, the uneasy relationship between the composer and his librettist Charles Jennens and the many changes Messiah underwent through the varying needs and capacities of Handel's performers. As well as tracing the history of the work's development, the book addresses musical and technical issues such as Messiah's place in the oratorio genre, Handel's treatment of structural design, tonal relationships and English word-setting. An edited libretto elucidates the variants between the text that Handel set and the texts of the early printed word-books. Donald Burrows brings many new insights to this fascinating account of one of the favourite works of the concert hall.

Haydn: The Creation
  • Nicholas Temperley
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    31 May 1991
  • Haydn's Creation is one of the great masterpieces of the classical period. In this absorbing and original account the author places the work within the oratorio tradition, contrasting the theological and literary character of the English libretto with the Viennese milieu of the first performances. The complete text is provided in both English and German versions as a reference point for discussion of the design of the work and the musical treatment of the words. A more detailed musical chapter examines the work through the movement types it employs - arias and ensembles, recitative and choruses - distinguishing the Handelian model from Haydn's own classical idiom. Nicholas Temperley also discusses the changing performance traditions of this work, surveys the critical reception throughout its history and quotes from the most signifcant critical literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Engaging Bach
  • The Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn
  • Matthew Dirst
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    29 March 2012
  • More than any other part of Bach's output, his keyboard works conveyed the essence of his inimitable art to generations of admirers. The varied responses to this repertory - in scholarly and popular writing, public lectures, musical composition and transcription, performances and editions - ensured its place in the canon and broadened its creator's appeal. The early reception of Bach's keyboard music also continues to affect how we understand and value it, though we rarely recognize that historical continuity. Here, Matthew Dirst investigates how Bach's music intersects with cultural, social and music history, focusing on a repertory which is often overshadowed in scholarly and popular literature on Bach reception. Organized around the most productive ideas generated by Bach's keyboard works from his own day to the middle of the nineteenth century, this study shows how Bach's remarkable and long-lasting legacy took shape amid critical changes in European musical thought and practice.

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